Books
Lane, James W. & Cunningham, Doris & Zabel, Morton & F, Thomas & Meehan
BOOKS The Ordeal of American Art Portrait of the Artist as American, by Matthew Josephson. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $3.00. EVER since John Macy published his Spirit of...
...New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Incorporated...
...After ten years of intensive research Mr...
...The translation is unfortunately not free from errors...
...A letter of Hawthorne has a present attraction in this day of "deferred payments" and "instalment plans...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes and Company...
...But we get so much excitement from a brand-new crime, very skilfully conceived, and from the masterly staving off of explanations until the last five minutes of reading, that we welcome all these old friends with positive pleasure...
...Josephson is unable to predict, but he is confident of its immanence...
...Erskine has now proved that he can vary the dish...
...Herr Olden's book is quite impartial and will be found particularly interesting in the section devoted to the war years...
...Witches, Jacobites, Methodists, fairs, bear- and bull-baitings, thefts of plumbago from the mines, ladies riding pillion, waylayings and murderings, were signs of those mostly healthy if unhygienic times...
...Others represented are St...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The brilliant imaginative gifts of Mark Twain were subjected to the requirements of raw native humor and literary barnstorming...
...The Door is entertaining reading, with good dramatic possibilities...
...The family swiftly disintegrates...
...It is useful not merely as a commentary on Stresemann but also as an index to recent German political activity...
...translated by R. T. Clark...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Only they are not, as so often with Galsworthy, fantoches...
...Vincent de Paul, St...
...Some of its ingredients we have encountered before...
...The borrower's name should have been given as O'Sullivan— John Louis O'Sullivan (1813-95), publicist, litterateur, diplomat, whose name can be found in President Polk's Diary and elsewhere, as one of the prominent New York political and literary lights of the forties...
...Every book has its prejudices, and some of those which dominate the present work may be easily discerned if it is compared with the well-known volume of Jacques Bainville...
...It remains one of the loudly debated matters in our literary forums...
...All in all, however, the text is readable and dramatic...
...2.50...
...That problem, naturally, remains unsolved, in spite of a far-flung propaganda for the artist in our midst...
...When this renaissance will transpire Mr...
...It has been no small task...
...If it will be of any easement to your mind, it is not worth while for me to object, but it deprives me of the pleasant feeling of having done you a kindness...
...In 1842 he persuaded Brownson to merge his Boston Quarterly Review with the Democratic and become a contributor to the latter...
...John L. O'Sullivan escorted her to Spain after she had made a vain effort to establish a Carmel in New York...
...And it is to keep intact their exalted reputation that they commit a crime—the infanticide of an incestuously begotten child...
...Teresa O'Sullivan (1817-93), who, though born in New York, died the prioress of the Carmel at Granjal del Campo, Leon, Spain, after a distinguished career in Central America, and the process for whose canonization has already made substantial progress at Rome...
...Until the close of the war he remained, as everybody knows, a conservative industrialist...
...They were the Just and never in word or deed would they have jeopardized their moral regency over the people of the valley...
...It is a strong, simple picture, with no trace of irony in its drawing, and Mr...
...Erskine has surrounded it by characters and a plot which never force the allegory beyond the point of interest...
...Emmet began his collecting when he was twelve years old and had the unbroken record of making four complete sets of autographs of the signers of the Declaration of Independence...
...Madigan has attained acknowledged leadership...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...Events, habits, enthusiasms, and fanaticisms of the period are thus compounded into a not otherwise very interesting or amusing novel of the type of The Forsyte Saga...
...It is in the end a relief when their secret is discovered...
...translated by Van Wyck Brooks...
...and the answers of distinguished debaters fell indecisively on either side of the fence that divided them...
...The whole second rank of American writers have reappeared during the course of investigations, and names once unfamiliar but now generally well-known—Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Hearn, Henry Adams—have ultimately found their way into the textbooks...
...82), which will be news about Baron Johann for his countrymen of Hiittendorf, Bavaria...
...The Door, by Mary Roberts Rinehart...
...The incredible advancement of American civilization during a brief century, and the momentary triumph of the purely physical forces of industry and commerce, has created a predicament with which the artists of European countries, always surrounded by a gentler sort of life and directly in contact with the past's heritage, have not had to contend...
...The apartness, and the closeness to the soil of the hardy inhabitants is therefore silhouetted against a most romantic background...
...Earlier and less important aspects of French development receive more stress than later and more interesting ones, probably because the course originally projected was longer than the one actually given...
...Their familiarity gives a needed touch of restfulness...
...Disagreeing with Mumford and Brooks, he would have the artist remain in America not in order to reconcile himself with his environment and thus achieve his proper aesthetic stature, but to stimulate the latent forces which would make a spiritual renaissance possible...
...The moral of Rogue Herries is that the philosopher's stone for which the title-character has been searching is really obtained in the consummation of marital happiness...
...New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company...
...1 HE rather unusual idea behind this story is that the Faith can inhabit the blood no less than the mind and the soul, and that a "hereditary Catholic" of this sort will feel a powerful impulse toward the Church against all the persuasions of environment...
...EVER since John Macy published his Spirit of American Literature in 1913, therein defining emphatically the colonial character of the arts in the United States for well over a century after the colonies had declared their political independence, American critics have been hard at work investigating the status of literature, painting and architecture in the democratic state...
...James W. Lane...
...At every step Mr...
...But if you will borrow it as a friend, you may command every cent that I can spare...
...Teresa...
...On the whole this is a usable summary, excellently printed...
...But during twenty years in which the aesthetic consciousness of the American people has grown phenomenally, it has been undertaken with a grave sense of responsibility...
...He sees in James's voluntary expatriation the only salvation of a refined sensibility to whom the American adventure offered no encouragement and little enchantment...
...Ten years ago when writing an introduction to Jurgen, Mr...
...Walpole spoke of "the world of Jurgen with its grotesquerie, its sudden beauty, its poverty and its pity, its adventure and romance...
...The literary exile has become a common feature in European cities...
...The chapter dealing with the values, scarcity and record prices of the autographs of the signers is curious and entertaining...
...Hawthorne wrote him in the course of a long letter: "I entreat you to take your own time...
...His final recommendations are unavoidably ambiguous, for while he seems to neglect the native genius that has recently appeared in such writers as Elizabeth Roberts, Willa Cather, Hart Crane and Archibald MacLeish, it is their moral humanism and idealism that he hopes to see ultimately revived...
...As to interest, it sounds queer between you and me...
...It might be wondered what that lamented scientist and gentleman would think at finding his name thus misspelled (an unpardonable sin in an autograph expert) every one of the many times it is mentioned in the book...
...In this most entertaining volume he has stepped out of the material atmosphere and, from more than twenty years experience, offers his readers a very fascinating and instructive series of sideviews, of literary and historic significance, of the personages whose autographs and writings now possess the interest and values collectors ascribe to them...
...Uncle Sam in the Eyes of His Family, by John Erskine...
...Meanwhile there seems to be little recourse but escape, yet Mr...
...There is the same kind of genealogical chart at the end and we run through the same diversity of characters in the text...
...Expensive Signatures Word Shadows of the Great: The Lure of Autograph Collecting, by Thomas F. Madigan...
...Paul of the Cross, St...
...A Short History of the French People, by Charles Guigneberi...
...He was a collector who lived before the strictly commercial era of the hobby, and at a big sacrifice he saw to it that the best one of his sets was preserved intact for the public's benefit...
...The central figure of his allegory (the "biography" is in the form of fiction) is a fair personal symbol of America at its best: acquisitive and benevolent, resolute and wistful, aesthetically limited yet surprisingly imaginative in unexpected places, immovably hopeful of the future...
...Gustav Stresemann was one of the most brilliant representatives of these thousands...
...Stresemann, by Rudolf Olden...
...The very manner of writing is different...
...It was he who as editor of the Democratic Review was instrumental in bringing Orestes A. Brownson to New York and incidentally starting Brownson's Quarterly Review...
...There is also a love affair, with a not very convincing happy ending...
...The changes of time and manners have wrought mightily in his favor, and today he is regarded either as a public benefactor, or an investor with rare commercial foresight...
...HP HIS is a severely simple and restrained story of the French ¦» peasants of the Cevennes Mountains...
...Literary autographs, English and American, supply material for three full chapters of a variety of informative detail about Dickens, Thackeray, Johnson, Scott, Lamb, Coleridge, Swift, Shelley, Keats, Poe, Thoreau, Irving, Whitman, Twain, Field, Emerson and others...
...He has perceived the richness of American materials and experience...
...Madigan knew of this he does not mention it...
...Several years ago the Nation published serially a symposium on the question, "Can the artist live and work in the United States...
...For generations this family had been building up a reputation for honesty and integrity until the Arnal name had come to be synonymous with justice...
...Like many other students, he dislikes to stigmatize America as a country in which creative genius is an anomaly...
...The main fault of Professor Guignebert's treatment is one of composition...
...The translation, one may add, is excellent...
...The people have an exaggerated respect for the administrators of the law, and in particular for the Arnal family...
...The concept of duty—Pflicht— bound thousands of men to their tasks, sometimes dwarfing their imaginations but guaranteeing to the nation a communal energy and integrity of the greatest patriotic value...
...a world descended from earlier worlds but unique of its own period...
...The novel depicts with skill how one or two innocent things could be read into an old woman's habits so that they would weight the balance toward her being branded a witch...
...1.00...
...1 HIS is the best of the season's mystery books...
...so they parted company after a short time and Brownson began his own historic Quarterly...
...Josephson's dilemma...
...Rinehart is expert at packing in false clews...
...Councilor, the head of the family, shoulders all the blame and so great is the confidence of the people in him that it never occurs to them to doubt his word...
...Aloysius Gonzaga to his mother...
...Autograph collecting in the United States, he tells us, began early in the nineteenth century, Dr...
...Critical studies as brilliant as those by Lewis Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks have been suggested by this research, until gradually the problem of the artist in America has emerged for general consideration by the artistic brotherhoods and by the general public alike...
...Josephson seems unwilling to prescribe a wholesale exodus for artists...
...In the latter class Mr...
...Morton Zabel...
...IMPERIAL Germany learned one lesson from reticent and meditative Immanuel Kant...
...The careers of more spectacular talents like Hearn, Crane and Bierce were haunted by the desire to quit the cramping provincialism around them...
...But here lies Mr...
...and even as he is being led off to jail an old woman accosts him seeking justice...
...In his pages the whole procession passes before us, the exiles as well as "those who stayed...
...Ordinary readers, uninfluenced in that direction, will find he has given them much pleasure and a valuable amount of general information...
...But the Arnals themselves had unconsciously succumbed to a fierce obsession in regard to the good opinion of their fellowmen...
...Not only are the content and the purpose different...
...The manners and customs of the England of Rogue Herries's span of life (1700-74) are accurately limned...
...A Gentleman of 1700 Rogue Herries, by Hugh Walpole...
...PROFESSOR GUIGNEBERT, who is normally a student of religious history, was invited to lecture on the past of his country to American soldier-students at the close of the war...
...Professor Guignebert is moderately anticlerical and violently pro-Revolution...
...The gem of this is a letter of St...
...Surratt, can hardly be considered sympathetic...
...Anything more unlike the truffles and spice of his literary romances cannot be imagined than this "biography of the national temperament...
...The heroine is the daughter of an ardently believing French father who died in her infancy, and a determinedly irreligious mother who has tried to make of the girl the finished symbol of her own secularism...
...r\.T LEAST Mr...
...Thus in the leading character, "Rogue" Herries, of this novel of the eighteenth-century Lake District, Walpole has created a man of the time, giving him the dourness of a Weir of Hermiston, the Celtic intuition, poetry, and dissatisfaction, and yet the tenacity and loyalty of the patriotic Englishman...
...William E. Sprague of Albany being the pioneer with a collection of 90,000 items...
...Cardinal Mundelein also has one of the finest of the rare signer Button Gwinnett autographs in his collection...
...2.00...
...The world in which his own characters live is similar...
...An undue play of imagination, either on his or his neighbors' part, might also prove that a man was the devil...
...The ensuing struggle, in which one contestant depends upon an almost maniacal hatred of religion, and the other solely upon love and prayers, is interestingly outlined, and the mother's final capitulation and conversion do not strain our credulity...
...Subsequently he realized that the key to the German future lay in international politics, and embarked on that amazing career as the Teutonic Briand which cost his life, won for him staunch friends and embittered enemies, and really closed only with the evacuation of the Rhineland...
...For the benefit of any neophyte collector who might be beguiled by Mr...
...It is no more than a jeu d'esprit, but for all that it is well worth reading...
...Walpole gives his creations humor, direction, objectiveness, and (in his best character, David, son of Rogue Herries) sweetness of temperament...
...The sense of the unreal hovers over Walpole's delineations as it hovered over The Memoirs of a Midget...
...New York: Charles Scribners Sons...
...The career of the artist may find little smooth and comfortable going in times of growth and transition, but from such times the products of high art often grow in abundance...
...Francis de Sales, St...
...The long line of statesmen, potentates, soldiers, prelates and eminent authors contributing to this collection of revealing human documents stretches out to 300 pages...
...Out of that harmony, encouraged and fostered by it, the arts of the future will grow...
...this is a serious, pedestrian kind of prose without any sort of charm or pretension to distinction...
...Thomas Addis Emmett (sic) of New York" (p...
...The oldest perpetuating line of autographs is that of the Popes...
...2.00...
...Since the war the difficulty appears to have increased...
...These addresses, based for the most part on those fine digests of history which the French have produced in such abundance, now constitute two volumes, translated into English by Mr...
...15.00...
...Among those immediately following this example was "the incomparable Dr...
...Madigan made the most comprehensive collection of these in private hands, more than a thousand letters and documents, and including all the great historical pontiffs for the past 500 years...
...That favorite Rinehart mise-en-scene, the household of a wealthy and intelligent spinster, is again dusted off and set up...
...IT WAS not so long ago, the author assures us, that the autograph collector would feel bound to apologize for his hobby and make whatever plea seemed best in its defense...
...5.00...
...Today a vast colony of American writers and painters cleaves to the left bank of the Seine, or inhabits semitropical islands and Italian hill towns, irreconcilable to the hostile materialism in American life which drove them into exile, but too often unable to use their newly won asylum for the great achievements promised from them...
...His Eminence Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago has some of these in his saints collection which numbers some forty volumes...
...Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company...
...But they are lost sheep, wondering how they can possibly get on without Councilor who was for so long the director of their consciences and deeds...
...He ends his volume on a note of hope, and prophesies the return of a real and abiding humanism in which the warring elements of industrial civilization will become absorbed by the larger vision of true social harmony...
...It was "sent to his friend J. L. Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review" (p...
...Catherine, however, pays the penalty of perfect goodness in literature by being distinctly the less interesting of the two...
...O'Sullivan's name has another present interest in the fact that he was the brother of Mother Adelaide of St...
...Madigan's fascinating recital of the who's who and why of this autographic Hall of Fame to attempt an adventure in the same direction, he offers some very practical advice as to availability and reasonableness of value and greatness...
...Briefer Mention Catherine de Gardeville, by Bertha Radford Sutton...
...192), who had borrowed some money from him, and asked for an extension of time on the loan...
...The situation is complicated by her discovery that her mother has withheld from publication her father's last writings in defense of the Church...
...Peter Canisius, the newly canonized Cardinal Bellarmine, and the Carmelite St...
...Josephson's heart goes out to the artist in his ordeal, and his wrath descends on the artist's enemies, as active now as ever...
...He sometimes leaves proper names in the original (or nearly so), and not infrequently lets himself off easily with verbal coinage that might have shortened the life of the renowned Mr...
...At the present moment some of our first writers—T...
...His references also to the victim of Stanton's malevolence, the unhappy Mrs...
...Richmond was a little overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task...
...and of "General Rochefermoy," meaning probably Roche, Baron Fermoy, of the Irish Brigade contingent...
...It is not mentioned what it cost him, but $19,200 was paid for another at a New York sale in 1928...
...The glad-heartedness of Dickens is in these pages instinct with right feeling...
...F. G. Richmond...
...The author writes with a curious detachment and perhaps because of that the characters persist in appearing strange and unsympathetic to us, but the book is beautiful with a power all its own...
...Evidently Mr...
...When Rogue's second wife returns after her flight from him and, saddened by hardships, begins to reciprocate his affection, the novel properly draws to a close...
...Color and imagination are the result, in a setting, the Cumberland Mountains, which with its brightly glinting chaffinches, in that "air with an off-scent of ice in it," should always beget them...
...Thomas F. Meehan...
...Erskine's boudoir readings of the classics...
...It increases to instant conviction when she stumbles upon proof that she herself was baptized...
...He follows in the footsteps of Henry James, Sargent, Whistler, Abbey, Lafcadio Hearn, Henry Adams and Stephen Crane, but he leaves behind him writers who, like another order of nineteenth-century genius—Melville, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, Howells and Bierce—are bound by force of necessity to remain on native soil and fight out their spiritual struggle at grips with reality...
...But not before her child by him is born and is left alone with its nurse (its parents both dying that night, the mother of childbirth, the father of consequent heartbreak) in the poor cottage which Herries would never leave and which he irradiated with his conjugal felicity...
...The genius of a youthful nation has appeared before him in all its unfulfilled miscellaneous grandeur...
...The revival of interest in Whitman has resulted, and the belated popular "discovery" of the two foremost geniuses of our literature, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, has been the crowning glory of these students...
...Unfortunately, artists capable of surviving such a test are few, and their fully achieved works still fewer...
...as is also that considering the autograph of the Presidents from Washington to Hoover inclusive...
...Nevertheless he is patriotic enough, although some of his excess virtue here may be attributed to the circumstance that the book was written in the war era...
...the likable police inspector, the vivacious niece, the niece's unjustly suspected fiance, even the "killer," ingenious and remorseless, all are again in evidence...
...GALSWORTHY'S characters have an unflinching sense of property, Hardy's had an unflinching sense of fate, the characters of Wells and Bennett have a business sense of the modern world, those of E. M. Forster have no sense at all of it, but the characters of no other British novelist are imbued with such heroic, picaresque, representatively wholesome, and at the same time fantastic elements as the better creations of Hugh Walpole...
...Mrs...
...While he sometimes falls down by insufficiency or ordinariness of dialogue, his writing in general is done with spirit...
...Doris Cunningham...
...Stepping out into the world as the author of a treatise on Bierstuben, the future chancellor learned business and politics...
...Yet Uncle Sam is at least as entertaining as Mr...
...If Mr...
...Chamson's Crime of the Just is like a vignette giving us a glimpse into the lives of the Cevennes peasants...
...Charles Borromeo, St...
...translated by F. G. Richmond...
...Obsession The Crime of the Just, by Andre Chamson...
...Josephson has written, with great charm and lucidity and likewise with virile sympathy, a history of American artists...
...He speaks of "de Kalb, the Frenchman" (p...
...I will not lend you any money on interest because then I should lose the security of your faith and honor, and make a mere commercial speculation of it and put myself in the same category as other usurers...
...The scheme was not a success, Brownson's contributions not proving acceptable to the Democratic Review's readers...
...There are other indications that he may not be so safe a historical guide as he is for authentic autographs...
...The purely esthetic charm and perfection which come from the hermetic sanctuary may be lacking, but the tough fibre of integrity and beauty is usually there...
...S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein—escape the encroachments of a later brand of barbarism...
...Fowler...
...If Henry James (together with his attendant exiles) is the hero of this book, and if Melville, Hawthorne and Dickinson represent the patient martyrs, America is certainly the villain...
...Catherine's attraction toward Catholicism, uncomprehended at first and a little defiant, begins with her learning of her father's life...
...2.$0...
...From time to time, as in the Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, which he subtitled A Romantic Macabre, even in the more introspective passages of Fortitude, Walpole has written material shot through with that sort of eerie imagination, battening upon ghouls and murky fastnesses, which is not the least, for instance, among the charms of Stevenson...
Vol. 12 • August 1930 • No. 14
